Obama graduated from Columbia College in 1983, and after spending a year in New York, moved to Chicago.

Wayne Allyn Root says, "I don't know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever! ... Nobody recalls him. I'm not exaggerating, I'm not kidding.

Questioner: Were you the exact same class?

Root: Class of '83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don't get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was... the guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It's very strange...

When asked about his undergraduate training at Columbia University, The New Times states that Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Many of his classmates don't remember Obama. He's not in the yearbook. Columbia couldn't find a picture of him at school.

What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him.

Does this ring true for you? Does it even pass the laugh test?

Barack or Barry - note that he is still Barry while at Occidental; at the next place we know he existed, Harvard Law, he has become Barack - spends two years at Columbia. He presumably receives two years worth of college credits. By taking two years worth of college courses.

Furthermore, in every other period of his life, he is known as the gregarious and charismatic young man he obviously was. Nor can his looks be described as ordinary. Nor is even his name ordinary. This man is a future president. And no one remembers him? No one?

What is the chance that a budding young politician of undeniable talent and promise spends his junior and senior years at Columbia, and no one remembers him? What is the chance that my right ass cheek, through spontaneous quantum vibration, suddenly transmutes into a hemisphere of polished gold? Don't you feel these probabilities are at least roughly comparable?

I can speak slightly to this issue, because while Obama (purportedly) was a transfer student at Columbia in 1981, I was a transfer student at Brown in 1989. It is certainly easy to disappear into the void as a transfer, because most everyone acquires their principal social networks as a freshman. I am also a naturally reticent person who was quite a bit underaged, and I have to say that if anyone "lived like a monk" it was me (although I was in the CS lab, not the library). And I certainly have no plans to seek political office!

Nonetheless, if you were a major media organization, and you went looking for people who were at Brown in the late '80s and early '90s, and asked them if they remembered Mencius Moldbug - giving my real name, of course - you would find them. Easily. Very easily.

So let me ask anyone who cares to comment below. How, exactly, do we - the American people, Lord help us - know that Barack Obama attended Columbia? Or, more precisely: why should we assume, on the basis of the evidence that we have, that he did? Do we seriously believe it is possible for a future President to be unremembered at his alma mater?

What we know is that a Columbia spokesman has confirmed that Obama attended Columbia. If we're lucky, this means precisely one thing: someone at Columbia went over to a file cabinet, opened it, and found a file that looked basically right. Which is more likely: that no one remembers one of the most articulate and talented black students on an Ivy League campus? Or that someone planted a file or two?

WikiCU, the Columbia wiki, in a paragraph which is of course completely unsourced, contains names of two individuals whom it claims claim to remember him (Michael Baron, a professor and contributor, and Michael Wolf, former president of MTV). They

confirm that he was a brilliant, standout student and that he was an active participant in seminars. Baron said he was one of the top one or two students in his class.

No wallflower, in other words. And despite this - no one else remembers him. (Nor did the NYT find Messrs. Baron and Wolf - at least, not on the first pass.) Does this make you less suspicious? Or more? WikiCU is also oddly tentative about a couple of other things:

Obama claims to have participated to some extent in anti-apartheid activities with the Black Students Organization, but no one is quite sure.

He majored in PoliSci, and claims to have concentrated in "International Relations," (now International Politics - this is a subfield of the PoliSci major and should not be confused with a "concentration," the Columbia term that substitutes for what most schools term a "minor").

"Claims." "To some extent." "No one is quite sure." And his concentration is not a concentration at all. You don't smell anything here? You don't detect perhaps a little teensy bit of an odor?

If we rule out the impossible, we have to accept the improbable. In my mind, knowing what I know (if anyone has better information, hopefully they will post it in the comments), it is close enough to impossible that Barack Obama went to Columbia, that I'm willing to say the unsayable and theorize about what else might have happened. Yes, I realize that this makes me a racist.

My guess is that young Barry dropped out of Occidental in '81, not to go to Columbia, but to go to New York and be a black revolutionary bohemian. We know he was a red-diaper baby (no shame in that - my father's parents were CPUSA members), and we know he was involved with an SDS splinter group at Occidental. Zombie has a very interesting timeline of his time in New York, during which it seems very probable that Obama met Bill Ayers. She also links to a completely unsubstantiated and irresponsible speculation that Obama was a roommate of Ayers and Dohrn - which I'm afraid can't help but remind me of this chilling story. Yes, these people are that evil.

What's certain is that whenever they met, Obama and Ayers did not just "meet." At least until Obama was actually elected to state office, their relationship cannot have been one of equals. Ayers was the warlord of the Weathermen. Since that time, probably everyone in his social network, and certainly everyone younger than him, has been a supporter, groupie, protege, or what have you. Ayers is a celebrity of the Left. Celebrities have peers, and celebrities have entourages. There is never any doubt over who is which.

And for those of you still convinced that Obama and Ayers were "neighbors," note that Obama almost certainly worked out of Ayers' office for three years. If you know anything about the granting process, the relationship between Ayers' "Small Schools Workshop" (educacion es revolucion!) and Obama's Annenberg Challenge is obvious: the AC was a funded grant proposal out of Ayers' office. An organizational bud or pseudopod, basically. So under this scenario, Ayers is Obama's professional mentor for at least fifteen years. (And if that doesn't bother you, cue up Larry Grathwohl.)

My guess - not because I have any reason to believe that this specifically is what happened, but just because every other explanation I can think of strikes me as less probable - is that Obama, as a young black radical with SDS credentials and obvious talent and potential, found it relatively trivial to earn quick admission to the inner circle, spent two years as a gofer, intern, catamite, or what have you for the Ayers crime family, and was rewarded by the gift of a Columbia degree and a ticket to Harvard Law.

Did Bill Ayers have connections in the administrative staff at Columbia? It would be remarkable if he didn't. Folks, the Movement was the center of the universe in 1968. If you were one of the top hundred people in it, let alone Bill Ayers, you were the giant glowing sun in the core of your social galaxy. You were a stud beyond studs. You had friends everywhere.

And would someone who blows up police stations blanch at planting a file? Honestly, can we even be confident that the staff at Columbia looked at the file? Who are they, and how do we know them? Again: why do we believe that Barack Obama attended classes at Columbia?

Moreover, a bogus Columbia degree is exactly the sort of thing an ambitious person can get away with in this world. Especially an ambitious black person. Everyone hates to be a racist. Of course, you have to have a serious pair of brass balls, but I think we know Obama has those.

But running for president? And, seemingly, winning? Is it possible? It would certainly be something new under the sun, that's for sure. But semper aliquid novi, as they say.

The story is easy to check. Just ask Barack Obama to tell us the names of some of his classes and professors at Columbia. He may not have had friends, but he took classes from professors. Then, find the professors and students. Not just one of each. All of them. (For example, there were apparently only seven other students, presumably all jealous of the One's rapierlike wit, in Michael Baron's seminar.) Interview these people. Take depositions, if needed. Ask them if they remember Barry. Or Barack. Or whatever he was calling himself at the time. If not...

Of course, the One is scheduled to be elected President in a few days. So he may not find the time to answer. But does it matter? All this will be so much more fun after the election.

And in case it matters, no: I don't really believe Barack Obama is the Manchurian Candidate. If I had to bet, I would bet that Steve Sailer has him pegged: Obama is Gatsby. I think Obama is a man without qualities, a person of no particular character or perspective, who is very good at conforming to the expectations of whatever context he finds himself in. I think he wound up in Ayers' circle just because he's a climber, and that was the handiest pole to climb. I think that in an Obama administration the White House will revert to its long-term trendline of becoming a basically ceremonial and functionless agency. I think, I think, I think.

But I don't know. And that worries me a little. Doesn't it worry you too? A little? Just a little?

I'm so glad you asked. So I'm not the only person who's wondered about this. I attended Columbia U. School of General Studies, 81-85, and attended many classes at the College. Columbia is a big place, so I can't claim to have met everyone, but it's always bothered me that I don't remember Obama, because at that time, there were few black students there, and I remember all of the ones I met. Yes, all! And I never heard of him either. When I read that he was sort of a classmate of mine, I had a sense of being gaslighted.

Here is fascinating post from some one who worked with him in NYC. The author notes that 1) Barack "was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers" Nor would he join with his colleagues for beers on Friday 2) Barack's description in his book of the company was embellished. Barack claimed to have a private secretary, but only the executives had private secretaries. He claimed to wear a suit, but everyone at the company wore jeans.

So this both supports and hurts Moldbug's theory. I can easily imagine a quiet, reserved, transfer student, living off campus, attending big lectures, going through two years of university never being noticed. But this excerpt also shows a penchant for exaggeration. Perhaps he only took a few classes at Columbia, rather than getting a full degree.

Obama's skin color is not 'black'. Not by a long shot. Even his facial appearance could be any combination of North African/Middle-Eastern/Carribean/Central-Asian. So that he might not stand out in memory as one of the few blacks on campus is not that surprising. I mean, even today he still doesn't stand out as 'black,' at least to me.

But, the rhetoric of this post is disingenuous. Mencius makes much of the lack of evidence supporting Obama's attendance at Columbia. Implicit is a specious argument, that this lack of evidence could mean the opposite -- that he did not attend.

We're smart enough here to know that this doesn't fly.

For such an affirmative (and might I add: extraordinary) claim you'll need to point to actual evidence, not merely the weaknesses of the other side's evidence.

One person who did remember Mr. Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar on international politics and American policy. Mr. Baron, now president of an electronics company in Florida, said he was Mr. Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course. Mr. Baron, who later wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School, gave him an A in the course.

Columbia was a hotbed for discussion of foreign policy, Mr. Baron said. The faculty included Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Half of the eight students in the seminar were outstanding, and Mr. Obama was among them, Mr. Baron said.

Michael J. Wolf, who took the seminar with him and went on to become president of MTV Networks, said: “He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant. I think he was truly distinctive from the other people in that class. He stood out.”

The thing about Obama's Business International gig is that it was a day job. Somewhat below his status, actually, as a Columbia graduate. One of the comments from his former coworkers on that blog bears it out: he remembers Obama as quite stuck-up.

My guess is that at the time he considered his real vocation to be that of activist. Why would he want to socialize with BI people?

So this is one thing. The fact that he didn't show up at the Columbia Black Students' Organization - that's another thing.

Mencius makes much of the lack of evidence supporting Obama's attendance at Columbia. Implicit is a specious argument, that this lack of evidence could mean the opposite -- that he did not attend.

You are overly influenced by our society's very reasonable standard of criminal evidence: the presumption of innocence.

But Obama is not on trial here. I am evaluating the past as history, not as a jury. There is no presumption of anything. I don't presume that Obama went to Columbia or that he didn't.

And the version of history in which he did, but no one remembers him, strikes me as less plausible than the version in which he didn't, and some easily faked things were faked. This is a personal opinion, of course, with which you're free to disagree.

So some people who went to Columbia can't place him there? Big deal. It's a big campus with nearly 20,000 students in all. I went to Columbia at the same time as Obama and, as it happens, I can place him there.

He belonged to the Black Student Organization, or at least attended some meetings there. They had their offices on the first floor of the old BHR dorm (since renamed Centennial Hall and substantially remodeled) at Barnard College across the street from Columbia. I lived on the first floor of the same building and, it's true, I noticed him.

I'm 6'2", and so was he, but he also wore a 'fro that made him seem even taller. I assumed he was a basketball player since he was tall and lanky. He had a distinctive face, and I immediately recognized him when he emerged in national politics.

Did he go to class? I don't know. But he was definitely on campus at the time.

Back to the main point: Lots of people at Columbia at the same time as me never met me, wouldn't remember me, and couldn't place me there. But it doesn't mean I wasn't there.

I didn't bother with the (expensive) school yearbook photo either, by the way.

I'm confident that Obama has a file at Columbia. These things are really not at all hard to fake. Especially in 1983 - were they even computerized then? All you need is a friend in the right place.

If my suspicions have any foundation, the reason he doesn't want to release the transcript isn't that it doesn't exist, or that the grades are bad. It's that the transcript would show he was in place P at time T, and quite a few people would remember that he wasn't.

Note, also, that none of this would ever have been a problem if Obama didn't run for president. And even then, it doesn't seem to be much of a problem.

Aha! We have our first witness. Setting aside your cartoons, which are not my cup of tea, your comment strikes me instantly as credible.

But seeing someone on campus, even going in and out of the BSO, does not a student make. For example: why wasn't he in the BSO yearbook photograph, or listed as absent? Neither would have cost him anything.

There are a lot of people at Brown, too, and I am confident that almost all of them don't remember me. Even though I spent three years there. On the other hand, with my guidance or knowing my major, you could easily find twenty. And I wasn't 6'2, nor did I have a 'fro.

What I'd like to see is more than one professor, and more than one student, with personal recollections of Obama in class. Ted, do you think your Columbia social network can dig up anything like that? If so, send 'em here and we can quell this whole rumor. I don't work for anyone's campaign, I don't care for McCain, and I have no interest in propagating lies.

JA, if you'll read the whole post, you'll see that I mention Wolf and Baron.

I did read the post. I was responding to your claim that the NYT couldn't track them down with a link to the NYT quoting them a year ago. Which you could have found on google in ten seconds if you cared about the truth.

Do you honestly believe Obama fabricated his time at Columbia? And enlisted at least those two men (and now Ted Rall, apparently) to lie for him? Come on.

I can vouch that Gordon Brown, the British PM, attended the University of Edinburgh; I still have the cheque (check) he bounced on me there. It seems mighty implausible to me that no-one remembers an aspiring politician like Obama. But was he an "aspiring politician", then? Perhaps he was a shy young man who hadn't started taking his tablets?

I said the NYT couldn't track them down on the first pass. Subsequently, someone realized that the story needed to be filled in.

Are you really that naive? Haven't you ever heard of someone in politics having a faked resume? Even a forged transcript? It happens all the freakin' time. And bear in mind, no one in 1983 expected Obama to be running for president.

I believe Ted Rall. What I'm looking for is someone who remembers Obama in class. Remember, this is an exceptional black student who earned two years of college credits and graduated with a degree in political science. It just doesn't strike me as possible that no one remembers taking a class with him - apart from a couple of belated leads whom his people obviously fed to the NYT.

Obama's mere appearance, for Christ's sake, was so memorable that Ted remembers him by sight, never having been introduced. Unfortunately, Ted was never in a class with Obama. He just saw him on campus at the BSO. I imagine all kinds of NY black activists were in and out of the BSO.

Are you really that naive? Haven't you ever heard of someone in politics having a faked resume? Even a forged transcript?

It just defies credibility that someone as scrutinized as Obama could have made it this long with that big a lie behind him. You're not talking about some guy with a mistress on the side, you're talking about fabricating two years of an Ivy League education that presumably were used to get into Harvard Law... where he excelled on his own merits?

And who, exactly, is supposed to be investigating this question? As far as I can tell, I'm the first to even ask it. And my investigative resources are quite limited.

Have you noticed any great tendency in our glorious, ever-believed press to aggressively pry into the One's background? Do you still believe you live in the Truthosphere, where all is known to all at once?

I'm not suggesting, BTW, that Obama is too dumb to have gone to Columbia. I'm just suggesting that he didn't. Plenty of very smart people don't have their lives perfectly on track.

People on the right have been exhaustively pulling out ANYTHING that could remotely IMPLY that Obama did something wrong. OMG Obama once said something nice about Rashid Khalidi! OMG something's wrong with his birth certificate! OMG Michelle Obama's thesis!

You're telling me you think it's remotely plausible that they missed something like the fact that Obama completely invented two years of education at Columbia?! And did it well enough to fool Harvard Law into letting him in?

Has anybody read Steve Sailer's book? Maybe there some substantial evidence of Obama's Columbia years there.

And as for you, dearieme, I think I've seen you make your claim to having a rubber check from Gordon Brown somewhere else, but in any case, I'm duly impressed. That's got to be one of the better ironical souvenirs in politics, unless somebody's nicked Hank Paulson's wooden nickel collection.

Sailer's references to Obama's time at Columbia reveal...nothing. He finds the same dearth of evidence. I'll guess it was simply a dark night of the soul for undergrad Obama, who longed to be romantic revolutionary Barack but couldn't shake the feeling that being boring degree-wielding Barry was a good idea, too.

Per your penultimate para, I guess he decided on the degree and the funny name, and all he wants now is the fancy job.

People on the right are looking for a smoking gun. They are looking for a certain kind of evidence which they conceive as valid in a juridical sense, which they imagine the press will have no choice but to repeat. This is because they still think of the struggle for power as an argument, not a fight. But I digress.

But, short of seeing Obama's transcript or other Columbia files, there's no chance of anything like that on that issue. This is a case of the dog not barking. Fox News talked to 400 Columbia students and found no one who remembered Obama. In a juridical sense, what does this "prove"? Nothing.

Of course this is reminiscent of the Swiftboat affair, in which John Kerry claimed to have been sent into Cambodia on secret missions. No evidence of any such mission was ever discovered, and nor would Kerry release his military records. The result: history records that Kerry was "smeared."

The historian's task is different. I am not trying to influence the election. I am trying to understand what actually happened. The story that Obama took poli-sci classes for two years at Columbia, and no one remembered him - at least on the first pass - does not strike me as credible. So, I search for alternatives.

I also note that if this question came up for, say, Sarah Palin, the level of "scrutiny" would tell us what happened about as fast as a thermonuclear blast will vaporize a shower curtain. Random right-wing bloggers just don't have either the quasiofficial access, or the sheer resources, to "scrutinize" much at all. Nor are they especially good at conveying the truth when they do find it.

Example: the standard cartoonish example of an Obama smear, "Obama is a Muslim." Anyone who believes this is clearly a total rube. And a few people do believe it.

Except that the campaign has to go and oversell it by claiming that "Obama has never been a Muslim, and was not raised a Muslim." Which is blatantly false, as you can see here and here.

So the false right-wing claim, which might be important if it were true, is easily confused with a smaller true right-wing claim, which is of no importance (who cares about eight-year-old Barry in Indonesia?). Except that it demonstrates the power of the Obama organization and its friends in the press to lie and get away with it.

Mencius: I have no trouble believing that 2008 Barack Obama, presidential candidate/messiah could get someone to fake a Columbia record for him. But what friends did 1987 Barack Obama, racial agitator in the wrong city, have who would do that for him?

Also, the only reason we know there's a file at Columbia is that, when Obama became a national political figure, someone checked and there was a file. That leaves roughly two decades in which it could have been planted. We do know he got into Harvard Law much earlier, but the circumstances of his admission are somewhat murkier.

Basically, I see people placing an enormous evidentiary weight on claims for the existence of official documents which have not actually been disclosed to the public, and which support a story - Obama the 6'2, Afro-sporting library wallflower monk - which is preposterous on the face of it. This makes me skeptical. Show me the documents or show me the people - preferably, both.

Obama could have been enrolled at Columbia and have a valid transcript without actually attending class much. Friendly professors help a lot. Bill Clinton graduated from Yale Law School despite being absent much of the time.

I know that the following is a slightly different case, but it shows that fooling the Ivy League Gate Keepers/administrative apparatus is apparently possible.

Conning one's way into Ivy League colleges does actually seem to happen, believe it or not.

Consider the case of one "Akash Maharaj", a Yale student who had supposedly transferred from Columbia.

During the Spring semester of 2008, Akash got into a serious fight with his boyfriend at Yale, and his boyfriend accused him of threatening to murder him to the Yale authorities. This led Yale to investigate his records, and it discovered that Akash had faked everything.

He apparently made his way through St. John's, NYU, and Columbia, before landing at Yale, although it's unclear if he attended any of these places legitimately, and while at Columbia claims he was a transfer from Yale.

Akash even admits in the linked Yale Daily News article that had he not been forced into a mental hospital by Yale, accused of making death threats by his equally nutty boyfriend, and then be subsequently investigated seriously by the Yale authorities, he would've graduated with a Yale degree with nary a suspicion.

The Yale Daily News article also gives several examples of people who faked their way into the Ivy League in the past.

Of course this is reminiscent of the Swiftboat affair, in which John Kerry claimed to have been sent into Cambodia on secret missions. No evidence of any such mission was ever discovered, and nor would Kerry release his military records. The result: history records that Kerry was "smeared."

Such missions would have been illegal, of course, and it's pretty clear that they occurred without much if any documentation. We also know that Kerry was at least right along the border and if anybody were to have gone into Cambodia, he was where they would have gone from.

Meanwhile, we know for a fact that the SBVT lied on several occasions -- forging signatures of veterans who supposedly agreed with them, etc. And then of course it came out that O'Neill had told Nixon he was in Cambodia.

We'll never know for sure, but the "smear" charge holds up to me.

As to your larger point, forging two years of a Columbia education in the 80s strikes me as a much more traceable lie than claiming to have gone on illegal super-secret missions 40 years ago in a foreign country. Especially since his name was listed as a graduate in a program in 83, a Columbia spokesperson said he graduated, he received recommendations to get into Harvard Law, etc., etc.

Also, the Yale Daily News article mentions that Akash's gay Hispanic boyfriend is a member of Skull and Bones.

Pop culture continues to present Yale, Skull and Bones, etc., as staunch stalwarts of the Establishment populated by uber-Wasp he-men to the unwashed masses through shows like "Gossip Girl" and silly documentaries on the History Channel.

Little do the unwashed know that in reality they resemble a gay Benetton ad.....

Your repetition of the Swift Boat FUD is classic: attack the messenger. FYI, O'Neill was talking about being in a completely different place near Cambodia.

You seriously believe that Kerry would not have released his military records if they were even ambiguous on the subject? Where is the famous dossier? With OJ's real killers, perhaps? Try finding a point-by-point refutation, perhaps, of this. "Seared, seared."

Let me follow that up with a simple question. Do you believe that there were US Swift Boat incursions into Cambodia in 1968 and 1969? You must, because otherwise you would believe that John Kerry was lying about his war record.

Why do you believe this statement? What evidence do you have, other than the obviously self-serving testimony of Senator Kerry, an extremely junior officer at the time, that this quite nontrivial historical event actually occurred? Please be as specific as possible.

(Joshua Muravchik produced probably the best summary of the whole Swift Boat issue.)

Basically, the Swift Boat officers wanted you to know that they knew John Kerry, they worked with John Kerry, and John Kerry did not recommend himself to them as a person of good character. In other words, he was a major dickweed. So they communicated a large set of facts that, to them, conclusively determined this judgment.

Unfortunately, the narrative they presented was neither intelligible to the voting audience nor entirely perfect in every last detail, and as a result it and they shall be damned in history for ever and ever. Such is always the fate of the loser. Nonetheless, the Swift Boat Vets succeeded in convincing me that John Kerry is, indeed, a major-league dickweed, and I can thank them permanently for that.

Joshua Muravchik produced probably the best summary of the whole Swift Boat issue. The issue is simply a single question: was JFK on secret missions in Cambodia? Because if he wasn't, we can certainly put this one in the freezer and leave it there.

Another possibility is that Obama, as an activist at Columbia, was a little like a football player on a scholarship. He is not ever seen in class, because he is not ever in class. It is generally understood that he has other things to be doing. And it might even be that someone else is doing his homework.

In other words, he might have been an intern/catamite/etc in some parallel, opaque world of activist politics. The goal is to have a capable young man for a couple of years who will do all kinds of odd jobs for you, while in exchange receiving a Columbia degree.

Note the extreme reticence, for example, in the interviews of people like the chairman of Obama's political-science department - Professor Chalmers. says as little as possible. He says: "I don't remember Obama." He doesn't say: "I don't remember Obama! Now isn't that interesting? Why don't I call up some of my old colleagues, and see if they remember the 6'2 mulatto with the Afro, who was such a promising young man and is now the leading candidate for president? Why, how odd!"

@ted rall: i find it slightly odd that you would describe columbia as "a big campus with nearly 20,000 students in all". while i suppose this is reasonable enough for columbia university, columbia college is a tiny campus (six blocks by half a block, or six by one-and-a-half if you want to be generous and count barnard and the extensions (SIPA, law, etc.) on the other side of amsterdam) with all of 4000 students even now. i couldn't find any enrollment histories in a thirty-second search, but before rupp's "expansion and enhancement", before CC went co-ed, before new york was remotely safe to live in, it was definitely smaller. certainly it used to be the smallest of the ivies.

fading into the background in nyu i could understand, but CC, not so much.

It is not being deceived, but undeceived that renders us miserable--because we asked to be deceived. Bam is beyond affirmative action: in other organizations it's called having an angel, or a bishop. Columbia, Harvard, U of Chicago professorship-- unsupported by a single paper or work product, no grades, no transcripts ever, no SAT's, no LSAT's. His angels are Ayers and Ayers connections to the Annenberg billions, and the Chicago Machine, and more. This is a man who does not know how many states are in the country he would be President of. But he doesn't need to know anything to rule, only to govern. And he has learned enough to rule--Henry Adams: Human nature is the begining and end of political education. It's gone faster than he thought; even Bam did not expect to go far this round against the Clinton Machine, only to get himself in play for the future. But like his angel said, guilty as hell and free as a bird, what a great country! Michelle can be proud.

I graduated from Columbia College at Columbia University a few years ago.

I wonder if Barack transferred into the College or into the School of General Studies.

If he was in the College, I believe he would've had to take Columbia's required and extensive Core Curriculum, which consists of 2 year-long seminars (Literature Humanities & Contemporary Civilization) that you have with about 12 students. Each of these two seminars is 2 semesters long, and you're stuck with pretty much the same group of 12 students for both semesters. They're also heavy discussion classes in which everyone is pretty much forced to participate. They meet twice a week and are actually longer than other classes, at around 1 hour 45 min. So if he did take these classes, it would be hard for nobody from these classes to remember him.

There's also 2 one-semester seminars (Art Humanities & Music Humanities) that he would've had to take, which are pretty much the same deal as above.

The other required courses in the Core Curriculum are a slew of writing, foreign language, foreign culture courses that he may have been able to avoid through earlier coursework at Occidental.

However, he shouldn't have been able to avoid the 4 seminars of Literature Humanities, Contemporary Civilization, Art Humanities, and Music Humanities. Columbia is pretty strict on this and all transfers must take these, as did all the transfers I knew while attending.

Columbia has had this Core Curriculum since 1919, and all 4 seminars were required when Barack attended.

Also, these seminars are not like the large lecture classes that make up a lot of college classes, where you only have to attend twice a semester (to take the midterm and final exams). Missing more than 4 classes results in automatically failing the class I believe.

If he was constantly absent from these seminars, he actually would've been more memorable to his seminar classmates, as "that guy who never came."

He may have attended the School of General Studies, which also awards the B.A. degree. The School of General Studies is for non-traditional students, who are usually older, have unfinished degrees, etc. It is similar to Harvard's Extension School.

The School of General Studies doesn't require the Core Curriculum nor any seminars, so Barack would've been more under the radar here.

It would seem more plausible that Barack transferred into General Studies. It's also much easier to get into than Columbia College, which is difficult to transfer into even for a minority.

Yet he is specified as a Columbia College grad in a couple places, such as in a profile in the Columbia College alumni magazine (which only profiles College grads, not School of General Studies), and on a Columbia website.

I graduated from CC in '83. Same year as Barack. Was there all four years, was a member of the black fraternity, went to BSO meetings at Malcolm X lounge, ate at Mama Joy's deli and Tom's diner, played ms pacman at west end bar, and spent time playing pickup basketball at the gym. Never met Barack, but know classmate who did. I never met George Stephanopoulos, Wayne Root, or Ted Rall for that matter. While the campus is small, to a lot of people especially those that lived off campus, NYC is the real campus. Net net, all the speculation around this post is pretty ridiculous.

Can you fill in any details on "know classmate who did"? Is this singular or plural? Did the classmate or classmates take classes with Obama, or just meet or see him on campus in some capacity, as Ted Rall did? If so, can he, she, or they fill in any details on what classes Obama was in?

You are obviously a very racist man, MM. I think the whole content of your "conspiracy theory" is absolutely ridculous. Just another poor conservative who can't handle the fact that this country's in the toliet thanks to you.

Well, while we're at it, let's talk about how Sarah Palin might actually be Trig's grandmother. You know, how sources have said her daughter was out for six months last year with mono, which is suspicious and...

What? These are both ridiculous topics drummed up to blind people to the real issues? Oops. My bad.

Everyone commenting here, be sure that you and everyone you know get out and VOT tomorrow. This race is closer than everyone thinks - it is by no means a 'blow out' as the media is trying to portray it. We cannot afford an Obama presidency.

I am usually sort of cautious before I comment here. I'll read the main post carefully (and usually that's because it rewards careful reading); if I am planning to comment and have some presence of mind, I'll read the other comments, so as not to be repeating something that's already said... But this post seems so mad, so obviously mad and so easy to check, that I want to go on the record having only skimmed part of it and without having even examined the other comments. My proposition is: yes, Barack Obama went to Columbia, and for our esteemed host to say "knowing what I know..., it is close enough to impossible that Barack Obama went to Columbia" shows that for all his intelligence, on this matter he's become a fool. So, there's my proposition; basically a snap judgement. I want to test my instincts, my sense of reality, against his.

Again, for the record, here's my epistemic process: I read the title. I saw, excerpted, the interview with an interview with another Columbia graduate W.A.Root, which I had seen before but to which I paid no attention. I scrolled on down a bit further and saw an argument along these lines - "Obama is charismatic and visually distinctive, I Moldbug am not, and yet you could find people who remember me from Brown. But the only confirmations of Obama's Columbia years I can find on the Internet are not documented in a way that would convince a motivated skeptic. Therefore, I choose to believe there was a conspiracy, and that Obama did not go to Columbia." I then googled 'barack obama columbia', and as the first hit found a link from columbia.edu, January 2005, which described Obama as a 1983 graduate.

At that point I thought, "this is idiotic", and resolved to post that opinion right away, for Moldbug's own good.

The American political process is intensely information-dense, and with the use of the Internet a person who wishes to look at all sides of an issue, and who actively seeks unusual views, can indulge that impulse to the point of personal overload; and there are too many 'issues' constantly arising for anyone to track reliably. Which is to say, I can forgive a moment of irrationality in a politically engaged person. Unless one simply takes a vow of generalized radical agnosticism, it is really really hard to call everything correctly.

Nonetheless, there are differing degrees of gullibility, and this looks to be a particularly crass error. So, while it is eminently understandable, I want to make a big thing of it. It's for your own good, Mencius.

There we go. Now to examine 'the evidence' dispassionately. Time will tell who was the fool.

All this talk of a sneaky entry into Columbia... Occidental College maintains a formal relationship with Cal Tech and Columbia called Cross Registration. I don't know shit about the mechanics of such a relationship or why it exists. Ask the President of Columbia. And for you so-called elites who put down the School of General Studies, I would say it's turned out as many illustrious graduates as Columbia College, which you snobs must admit, is not Harvard or Yale.

Ted Rall is a simply a knee-jerk lefty. Like all lefties, he's a supreme narcissist living in a self-made Marxian utopia that was thoroughly refuted theoretically by about 1870 and socially by 1970. When he squeals "I remember Obama from Columbia University", I wouldn't believe him. As you pointed out, you can't be a brilliant debater, wield a rapier wit, be one out of a small number of students, and only have one guy remember you. Doesn't make sense.

Here's a little blurb on Ted Rall from that most excellent compendium of information on the radical left, "Discover The Network". Enjoy.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1845

Cartoonist and syndicated columnist

Reserves condemnation almost exclusively for Republicans

Characterized America’s post-9/11 war in Afghanistan as "genocide" perpetrated solely to clear the way for the U.S. to build an oil pipeline through the region

Supported the Marxists Jean Bertrand-Aristide and Hugo Chavez, as well as the Castroite government of Grenada

Opposed sanctions against Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Serbia

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in August 1963, Ted Rall is a cartoonist and syndicated columnist who serves as President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. His cartoons and writings are distributed by Universal Press Syndicate and appear in approximately 140 American publications, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He also regularly posts his opinion pieces on his website. One of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, Rall is a two-time winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

From 1981 to 1984, Rall studied engineering at Columbia University, where he contributed cartoons to the campus newspapers. He failed to complete his studies at that time, but he returned to school a few years later and graduated in 1991 from Columbia's School of General Studies with a B.A. degree in engineering.

Through his writings, cartoons, and public statements, Rall attacks conservatives on a regular basis. In June 2004, for instance, he said that the recently deceased former U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, was surely in hell “turning crispy brown right about now.” Expanding on this theme, Rall said, “I think most people view the President as a fair target. Reagan was a public figure, and he was an idiot. And if he were around and lucid, he would probably say that it [criticism] comes with the territory…. If there is a hell, this guy is in it."

Shortly after Reagan’s death, Rall wrote a column titled “Reagan’s Shameful Legacy,” which contained a number of gross misrepresentations of historical reality: “Reagan's quack economists trashed scholarships and turned welfare recipients into homeless people and refused to do anything about the AIDS epidemic, all so they could fund extravagant tax cuts for a tiny sliver of the ultra-rich. Their supply-side sales pitch, that the rich would buy so much stuff from everybody else that the economy would boom and government coffers would fill up, never panned out. The Reagan boom lasted just three years and created only low-wage jobs. When the '80s were over, we were buried in the depths of recession and a trillion bucks in debt. Poverty grew, cities decayed, crime rose. It took over a decade to dig out.” Rall also dismissed as a “myth” the notion that Reagan had led America to victory in the Cold War, crediting him only with having “elevated unjustifiable military action to an art.” Finally, he accused both Reagan and President George W. Bush of relying on “Christianist” -- which he described as “the radical-right equivalent of Islamist” -- “depictions of foes as ‘evil.’”

In the 1980s Rall supported the Castroite government of Grenada. Later, he backed Marxists like Jean Bertrand-Aristide of Haiti and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He alleged, without evidence, that President George W. Bush tried to overthrow Chavez. He opposed sanctions against Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Serbia. He strongly hinted that leftist Senator Paul Wellstone, who had died in an October 2002 plane crash, was assassinated. And he said that George W. Bush should be “warming a prison cell right now” for having led the U.S. to war in Afganistan and Iraq.

Rall characterized America's post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan as “genocide,” perpetrated, in his estimation, for no reason other than to clear the way for the U.S. to build an oil pipeline through the region.

In November 2003, during the height of Iraqi sniping attacks against American forces in the Sunni Triangle, Rall wrote a faux recruitment ad for “Iraqi resistance forces,” which stated: “Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces…. [W]e are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority…. Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerrilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves…. [I]t will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation…. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country…. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass … poor and uneducated, [they] do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war…. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.” In a May 4, 2004 Op Ed titled “An Army of Scum: Or, We're Looking For a Few Good Homosexual Rapists,” Rall wrote the following about the prisoner-abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq:

“Now it's official: American troops occupying Iraq have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America's victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers…. … Don't be fooled by military apologists who insist that these American SS are nothing more than a few bad apples…. We know about Abu Ghraib only because the inbred psychos … were dumb enough to snap photographs as mementos … It's like the Rodney King video: cops beat up blacks every day, but there usually isn't a camera around. Abu Ghraib, you can bet your bottom dollar, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Our military is structurally corrupt.”

In a cartoon he published two months later, Rall depicted then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice as an inmate at a “racial re-education camp” where she referred to herself as a “house nigga” and as George W. Bush's “beard” -- i.e., a decoy whose purpose was to conceal the President’s alleged racism.

Also in 2004, Rall implied in a cartoon that former professional football player Pat Tillman was an “idiot” for having given up a lucrative sports career to enlist in the U.S. Army to fight in Afghanistan, where he ultimately was killed on April 22, 2004. Suggesting that Mr. Tillman had “falsely believed” that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were linked to the 9/11 attacks, the cartoon referred to Tillman as a mere “cog in a low-rent occupation army that shot more innocent civilians than terrorists to prop up puppet rulers and exploit gas and oil resources.”

That same year, Rall advised that America should pull all its military forces out of Iraq immediately. “Sooner or later,” he wrote, “one way or another, we’re leaving -- as defeated and bankrupt and demoralized as we were when we fled Saigon [in the 1970s]. The only question now is: how many more people are we going to kill before we cut and run?”

From August 1998 to August 2000, Rall hosted a weekend talk show on KFI radio in Los Angeles. After 9/11, KFI rehired him temporarily to travel to Afghanistan and file live reports from the battlefield. In 2005 Rall hosted another weekend radio program on San Francisco's KIFR-FM.